My Rare Replay was supposed to arrive today through Amazon. I cant moan that much though because in general everything I have ordered from them has arrived promptly and in good condition. I am however absolutely itching to get it and to start playing the games. I grew up on a lot of these titles Atic Atac one of the Spectrum games on the disc was one of the first Spectrum games I remember really enjoying.

I have done everything possible today to ignore the fact that it is not yet in my possession, I have played other games, I have gone out and brought retro games from a charity shop I even brought and hammerd the Path of the Ultimate Warrior DLC for WWE 2K15 (I will talk about this soon enough). I think one of the things I have spent the most time doing though is simply thinking about Rare Replay, thinking about what is on the disc, what is not on the disk, why these games are missing be it down to licensing issues or other reasons. It is obvious why the Donkey Kong games are not on there with Donkey Kong belonging to Nintendo, I can understand GoldenEye not being on there due to the bong license but when we have BattleToads NES and arcade on there why did the SNES BattleToads in battle maniacs not make the cut?

One thing that really hit me when I stopped and thought about it though is that there are now more N64 titles available on the Xbox One than there are on the Wii U. Even saying or writing that seems strange but here are the facts.

On Rare Replay released today you can get the following N64 games

Killer Instinct Gold
Jet Force Gemini
Blast Corps
Conker’s Bad Fur Day
Banjo-Kazooie
Banjo-Tooie
Perfect Dark


(The first four are pure N64 Emulated, the last three have had slight touch up's)

On the Wii U’s Virtual Console shop, you can buy and download

Paper Mario
Donkey Kong 64
Super Mario 64
Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards
Mario Tennis
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

If you want those six N64 games on the Wii U though you will need to pay £54 in total and have nothing Physical to show for it at all, with no real chance of discount (Unless you get a discounted Nintendo cash card from somewhere like CDkeys).

Or you can get the 7 N64 based titles on Xbox one for, well depends what seller you go to but its £18 on Amazon (I did see it for £16.50 on one site for awhile) and you have a disc to keep as well and all kinds of extra challenges added in, documentary footage, making of videos plus a whole bunch of Spectrum games,Nes games, an arcade game, an original xbox game, 5 or so Xbox 360 games on top for your money.

When you look at it in this way from my perspective at least this just makes Nintendo look kind of greedy and not as business savy as they should be in this digital area. OK if you make your Wii U go into Wii mode you can go to the Wii Virtual console and then this puts the amount of N64 games you can get up to around 20 but still at a high high cost.

I cant wait to see sales figures for Rare Replay. It does raise all kinds of questions though. What would have happened if Nintendo had brought out Rare, would we be looking at Rare Replay on the Wii U with added Donkey kong related games? Or would Nintendo have preferd to have slowly drip fed these games on to there virtual console store at £9 per N64 game, £3.50 per NES title etcetera? We will never know what would have happened if Nintendo owned Rare maybe would have milked the IP for every penny maybe they wouldn't have. Why not leave me a comment and let me know what you think.